Where the Ground Can Melt
The Ateliers de La Madeleine are pleased to present Theo Guicheron Lopez’s first exhibition in France at the ancient Baths of Constantine in Arles.
An artist and poet, Theo Guicheron Lopez’s entire oeuvre stems from his profound connection to places, in the sense given to topophilia by the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan: the feeling of attachment to a place, this emotional and affective relationship that binds human beings to the places with which they identify, thus exalting the symbolic dimension of human
habitation and the sense of belonging to the world.
The exhibition «Where the Ground Can Melt» unfolds like a palimpsest across the various rooms of these two-thousand-year-old Roman baths. With his handcrafted wooden sculptures and installations, created from wood species whose history and provenance he knows intimately, the artist opens up perspectives on what it means to be present. How do we situate ourselves when countless geological strata—terrestrial, natural, mineral, and artificial—and as many memories are piled up beneath our feet.
As we meander through the anthropogenic era of blackened asphalt, Theo Guicheron Lopez uses words and gestures to draw our attention to how oil has replaced the land, shaping artificial environments that permeate our daily lives. Defying literal criticism, the artist sketches a sensory landscape on the remnants of ancient stone, inspiring a new poetics of the earth.
Keystones or lutherie pegs, location pins, musical or measuring instruments, magnetized to the ground or stretched towards the sky, massive or tapered, often in precarious balance, his works weave as many encounters: between wood, stone and bitumen, between geological and historical times, between the craftsman-artist of today and the architects of yesterday, between the work and the spectator, opening at every moment a space of resonance.
«Where the ground can melt” offers a new perspective on space and time, a score that plays with gravity and the environment, a contemplative moment that invites us to suspension as well as to a deeper anchoring, an external topography to draw new internal geographies.
For the creation of his works, he collaborated with the BriZepierre Workshops and the Fontvieille stone quarry. He also worked with cypress wood sourced from the grounds of the La Madeleine Workshops in Arles and drew from his collection of wood species originating primarily from France, Spain, and Poland. Bitumen fragments were collected locally, notably in Marseille.